Municipal Registers • The…

Municipal Registers
• The requirement that municipal registers be provided online makes sense and aligns with current best practice.
• The change to the objection process by allowing any owner of a property to object at any time will waste Council and staff time at the municipal level by potentially inundating Councils with these requests without the requirement to provide studies or background information that would provide a rationale as to the owner’s request.
• Increasing the standard for listing a property by applying Ontario Regulation 9/06 aligns with current practice in some municipalities where there are staff and resources to support this work. However, this will be a challenge for smaller municipalities which do not have dedicated staff to undertake this type of work and evaluation and may now be required to hire external help to undertake heritage evaluations, even for listed properties.
• The requirement to remove a listed property from the register after two years if a NOID has not been issued and prohibition from adding it again for five years will actively make it more difficult for municipalities to protect cultural heritage resource which are important to their residents and property owners. This will result in huge numbers of property being unprotected for years at a time as they cycle on and off the register, which will also waste staff and Council time removing and re-listing properties over and over again. There is not the capacity in municipalities to designate every listed property they have within two years, but this is what the province appear to be directing through this legislative change.
• Municipalities will attempt to designate as many properties as possible to prevent their heritage protection from lapsing, and this will be done primarily without owner consent or engagement as the timeline is so short and the province is forcing the hand of Councils, Municipal Heritage Committees and staff. This places a substantial burden on listed property owners but the province is leaving municipalities little choice but to forge ahead. The appeals process will mean that many of these designations will end up at the Ontario Land Tribunal, likely creating further backlog and slowing the development process even further by forcing the Tribunal to address huge numbers of designations of listed properties.
• Further, the forcing of municipalities to designate listed properties is an extremely poor way of involving communities in the preservation of their own heritage. Many municipalities across Ontario actively work with property owners to list their properties with the understanding that they will remain as listed properties; this is often what a property owner feel comfortable with and listing provides a good middle ground with limited red tape between designation and no heritage protection that people feel positive about. Listing is an important process that serves a purpose beyond tying the hands of developers, which this legislation treats it as. Many municipalities tell their heritage property owners that listing is not a stepping stone to designation – because it has not been – and these amendments make liars of staff, municipal heritage committees and Councils who have worked diligently with their community members to protect and preserve the things that make their communities unique and desirable places to live, work and play.

Individual Designation
• The increase in threshold for designations will make designating properties more difficult for municipalities, particularly those which may have only architectural or historical value but still may be highly significant to a community. It creates less flexibility for municipalities to protect their owner resource based on their understanding of their own communities within the provincial framework.
• The new requirement that a property must be listed in order to be designated after prescribed Planning Act events is clearly an active attempt to prevent municipalities from protecting properties of cultural heritage value through the land use planning process. Given the new requirements for the removal of a property from the Register after two years and prohibition on re-listing it for another five, this will lead to municipalities having to guess at what properties might have a Planning Act application coming forward for them and listing properties accordingly as opposed to in a transparent, methodical and data driven way. While this intends for the development process to be more transparent, it makes it more difficult and less transparent for everyone involved as municipalities will rush to list properties to ensure that the conditions can be met when a Planning Act application is forthcoming, as opposed to taking a measured and long term approach to listing. This will make it more difficult for municipalities to meet their obligations under the Provincial Policy Statement and other relevant planning policy that directs the preservation of cultural heritage resources as part of the land use planning process.

Heritage Conservation Districts
• The requirement for heritage conservation districts to meet a threshold through prescribed criteria creates predictability with regard to evaluation and consistency for municipalities and is a positive change in the legislation. However, the use of Ontario Regulation 9/06 is not appropriate as it is heavily tailored for individual property evaluation and lacks the nuance required to articulate the cultural heritage value found in larger cultural heritage landscapes. It would be advisable to develop new criteria for this purpose. A sample criteria used by a number of municipalities for HCD designation is attached as a separate document. These criteria build on Ontario Regulation 9/06 and expands it to include additional criteria to better reflect how heritage conservation districts are understood and evaluated and how they function as cultural heritage resources. A new regulation should be adopted with new criteria specific to HCD evaluation.
• At present, there are many heritage conservation districts in development across the province including those where the study has been completed and the plan is in progress, but the designating by-law has not yet been brought forward. The MCM should consider that the new evaluation criteria should only apply to those HCDs where the plan phase has not yet been initiated by Council (i.e. those still undergoing study) to prevent municipalities from having to go back and amend already completed heritage conservation district studies which use different, older criteria as this would be a waste of staff time and municipal resources.
• The ability to amend or repeal an HCD by-law and plan is a positive addition to the Act. However, the development of the processes should include extensive consultation with municipalities to ensure that they are not burdensome or subject to frivolous requests by third parties to amend or repeal and by-law that does not suit them.